50 - How do I insert completely blank pages in Adobe InDesign

First of all, thank you for your extremely helpful videos. I do have a question/situation though. When I insert the 2 blank pages for the cover and inside cover for a freelance job I'm working on, when the page numbers do start, how do i get that first page number to be "1" rather than "3"? Does that make sense? Nothing I'm trying is working…

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at adding blank pages to a document, like this. Because at the moment, our document is all starting at page 1, but we need some space to put in things like this. We need our blank page, and start creating our 'Header'. We need this inside blank page, contents page, this image page. So it's not actually going to start till page 5. So let's go and do that in this video.

And this one is nice and quick, which will make the editors of this video, Tayla or Jason, not sure who's doing this one, but you must be very happy to see that this one is less than two minutes long. I'm stretching out the video now, let's go and do it.

So to insert some pages we could just click this little ‘New Page’ down the bottom here. It will 'Create a New Page'. The problem is, I put in something in the new page that has the Master Page applied, which is the primary text frame, it has this line in the middle, and our page number. What we want to do is put in some blank pages. So I'm going to go to 'Edit', 'Undo'. And what the easiest way probably is, if we click in this little 'Pages' panel, and this little menu, and here, go to 'Insert Pages' we could say, how many pages, in my case, I need 4. For my cover, my inside 'Spread', and the left 'Spread' that I have my big image on. And I want to say, insert it 'Before Page 1', and apply 'No Master' pages. Click 'OK'.

You can see here, I have page 1, 2, 3, and 4, they're all blank, and the document doesn't start till page 5. Another way you could do that, is 'undo' it. And, see up here, there's one called 'None'. This is our Master Pages up the top here. And what we can do is, where it says 'None', just drag this 'None' one down, at the beginning here. Just keep dragging, drag, drag, another one. Drag it to a gap. This is the reason probably why I don't do it this way. It can be a little hard, it's easy for one page but when you start to put in 'Spreads' and stuff-- so I'm going to bin those.

That is the end. A really short video. You're welcome, Tayla and Jackson.